links for 2008-11-28

"But MahlerÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s symphony would not let him rest. Over the next few years he attended every performance within reach, met his future wife in the adjacent seat at LondonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Royal Festival Hall and, as the obsession intensified, took 18 months off work to study the score and discuss it with such leading interpreters as Leonard Bernstein, Sir Georg Solti and Leonard Slatkin. In September 1982, after an International Monetary Fund summit, he put his reputation on the line by conducting the American Symphony Orchestra in a private performance for financiers and politicians at the Lincoln Centre. A former British prime minister, Sir Edward Heath, himself a spare-time conductor, called it Ã¢â‚¬Å“a very remarkable featÃ¢â‚¬Â, but that was, if anything, an understatement."

"IraqÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s multiple fault-lines are especially visibleÃ¢â‚¬â€and occasionally bloodyÃ¢â‚¬â€in Nineveh and Mosul. Some towns in the province have a record of Shia-Sunni enmity. Nineveh has IraqÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s largest minority of Christians, themselves divided into various sects, some speaking Aramaic, the language of Christ. In a northern arc dwell the Yazidis, more than 500,000-strong they claim, who follow an ancient religion that reveres a Peacock Angel; many Muslims damn them as devil-worshippers. Then there are the Shabaks, who claim descent from Persians and follow various brands of religion, including Islam. There are also the Turkomens, stay-behinds from the days when Mosul was the capital of one of the three Ottoman vilayets (administrative regions) that were crudely lumped together to form Iraq when the Turkish empire collapsed after the first world war."

"Public spending is hard to ramp up quickly and harder still to cut when the economy recovers. Much of the benefit may leak to neighbours who do not bear the cost. Europe also has a more solid fiscal buttress. The public sector accounts for a much bigger slice of GDP so a drop in private spending has proportionately less impact on the economy. State benefits for the unemployed are larger than in America, so public spending rises by more in a downturn. Tax receipts are bigger too and they tend to fall quickly in downturns, providing an automatic fiscal relief for taxpayers." So is the Economist now saying a large public sector is a *good* thing?

"Ã¢â‚¬Å“THEY said you couldnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t create islands in the middle of a city,Ã¢â‚¬Â shouts a property advertisement over a jammed Dubai motorway. Ã¢â‚¬Å“We said, whatÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s next?Ã¢â‚¬Â The range of answers has become gloomier by the week, as the debate moves from whether the Dubai property bubble will burst to just how bad it is going to get. Some nervous bankers think property prices could fall by 80% or so in the next year or so. A few months ago, rich foreigners who had bought villas in Dubai were complaining about the quality of the sand on their artificial beaches or the difficulty of getting water to circulate around the twiddly fronds of the man-made island shaped like a palm. Now prices for some smart developments have been cut by 40% since September, shares in property firms have lost 80% of their value since June, and big developers are laying people off. " The credit crunch: it's not all bad.

"England won 1-0 but in the grand scheme of things the game will be remembered for only one thing: the presence of a 22-year-old Nottingham Forest footballer named Viv Anderson. Anderson, or "Spider" as he was known to team-mates because of his long legs, duly became the first black footballer to play for England and that is why his name will be remembered long after other internationals from that era have been forgotten."

"He will be replaced by Rich Riley, who has been with the company for about 10 years. His appointment will cement the switch of the firm's European focus away from its traditional base in London." I assume they mean TOBY Coppel. And they got the wrong Riley.